A Horse Is Not A Home

Miike Snow, outsider art and when things aren’t what they seem.

Taran : Dearest fellow rats, do you ever feel betrayed? Lied to? Perplexed by learning what you thought was so, was in fact, not so? Today I bring a tale of an album that I consider both deeply strange and equally  formative, a source of puzzlement, joy, and inspiration.

So sit back, relax and let’s go for a gallop across time and (liminal) space!

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In 2007, the band Miike Snow was formed in Stockholm by a Swedish production/songwriter duo and an American singer. They took the Jackalope as their logo, a mythical horned rabbit originating in North American folklore. None of them are called Mike Snow: Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg (also known under their producing/songwriter duo alias of Bloodshy & Avant) were joined by vocalist Andrew Wyatt to make up the trio. The name apparently belonged to an assistant engineer who worked on a video with the trio in Los Angeles, with an additional ‘i’ added for both stylistic and legal reasons. Their pirated name matches Wyatt’s apt description of their sound as “cubist pop”, borrowing from different genres to create a genuinely novel sonic juxtaposition. 

As they emerged into the public sphere in 2009 the band was shrouded in mystery, with the mythical Jackalope emblem serving as a mask to conceal the band members’ identities as they dropped indie pop remixes and their own tracks across old-school internet music forums like RCRD LBL. Their self-titled debut album dropped later that year, a collection of strange, liminal tracks straddling the worlds of electronic pop, indie and alternative music whilst addressing themes of urban decline, loss and disorientation, all imbued with a folkloric, prehistoric view of the natural world. 

The album’s first single ‘Animal’ explores how we negotiate a society that doesn’t satisfy our primal basic needs as humans. After contemplating “am I free or am I tied up?” the chorus hook blares “I change shapes just to hide in this place but I’m still, I’m still an animal / nobody knows it but me when I slip, yeah I slip I’m still an animal”. It broke into the UK top 100 and has since been certified as platinum-selling in the US, treading a fine line between pop production sensibilities and its off-course lyrical content. UK rat readers may know the track as the theme song of much-loved British sitcom Friday Night Dinner. 

As the album continues, it begins throwing listeners off the pop music bandwagon in earnest, starting with the following track ‘Burial’. You can’t get much more existential than a chorus that goes “at your own burial, don’t forget to cry”. Yet all the while, these morbid, mortality-contemplating words are couched in softly twinkling keys, warm piano and otherwise pristine production quality. 

Some lyrics trend towards the nonsensical, such as on the contradiction-laden ‘Black & Blue’, featuring lyrics such as “Hello mystery, don’t bother to explain”. On ‘Sans Soleil’, Wyatt ponders “how can we expect to build a boat with seagulls running everything?”. The natural world bubbles to the surface like some form of primordial ooze, hard to comprehend yet of monumental significance. With a four-on-the-floor dance pulse, ‘In Search Of’ chronicles our relentless search for a remedy - for bad choices, regrets, or maybe for our whole species. The synth-heavy soundscape of ‘Cult Logic’ seeks to change our thinking, begging “will you free me from the logic that I knew?”, conceding “I’ll believe it even if it is not true”. The track could be seen as seeking an openness to romance, or it could be seen as wider commentary on a sick society needing freedom from its own self-destructive programming.

The only song with a more straightforward message is ‘Song for No One’, which more-or-less does what it says on the tin. A breakup track, it gets straight to the point in the chorus, with Wyatt plainly stating: “When your love has gone, you carry on / this is her song, this is the song for no one”, all over a simple, whimsical guitar riff. The song’s production doesn’t throw any curveballs, and the verses only go very slightly off the rails as they meander through “the Serengeti plain” to “the Italians on the bank” and “a music box to catch your tears”. Despite its pop-centred exterior, just the title itself remains a subversion, a song for no one. And it’s totally devastating, disarming with its cheery delivery before cutting to the cold, crushing truth of lost love. 

The album was embedded within my younger years, its singular bizarreness since seeping into my subconscious, an inexplicable oddity often returned to within the ever growing musical landscape in my mind. Our CD copy was a regular feature on long car journeys, and continues to be played regularly to this day as part of my kitchen’s collection, nestled between old classics and new favourites. For a decade and a half my sibling and I debated the lyrics of the chorus of the saw-wave drenched ‘Plastic Jungle’: is it “Sometimes I wanna get sane”? Or is it “stained”? Or some nonsensical mixture of the two? The depressing official answer is that Wyatt simply repeats “I wanna get slain” over and over again, with every repeat deepening his isolation and apathy towards our materialistic society.

It wasn’t just us hooked. The popularity of Miike Snow saw them top the UK dance album charts, and the band would tour across the UK, Europe, the Americas, Asia and Oceania throughout 2009 and 2010. Remarkably, these shows saw the band waylay any programmed tracks whatsoever, recreating their synth-heavy tracks live using a space-age array of modular synths and other instruments. 

But little did my younger self know, the musicians behind Miike Snow weren’t quite who I thought they were. Before Miike Snow – and indeed concurrently with the band’s existence over the past two decades – their production team Bloodshy & Avant have actually had their hands in a slew of major hits working with some of the world’s biggest mainstream popstars. They’ve worked with Madonna, Katy Perry, Kylie Minogue and Jennifer Lopez, and produced Britney Spears’ Grammy-winning hit ‘Toxic’. Wyatt himself has also worked with huge names like Miley Cyrus, Liam Gallagher, Lady Gaga, Lorde and Dua Lipa as a producer and songwriter, and co-wrote Bruno Mars’ 16x platinum certified power pop track ‘Grenade’, which came out the year following the debut Miike Snow album. 

To my child brain, Miike Snow were outsider indie Swedes, not highly established industry names responsible for some of the biggest hits of the 2000s and 2010s. As is so often the case in the music industry, they didn’t simply appear out of nowhere as complete unknowns, and knowing all this now makes the left-field world of Miike Snow even stranger. Sure, their production crispness and ability to write catchy chorus hooks with ease checks out. But how and why did these industry-grade producers create music that is so fundamentally weird?

The late-2000s wasn’t quite the social media-driven attention economy hellscape of today, where authenticity is engineered with eerie precision using dubious means. It seems that Miike Snow were more a passion project by seasoned and talented musicians than an industry plant or psyop, and the attention the band drew was never anticipated nor expected. “We didn’t even think about touring when we started the album”, Wyatt told Out Magazine in 2009, explaining how Miike Snow developed organically just through the trio messing around together.  

In fact, much of what Miike Snow represented then is entirely antithetical to the music industry in its contemporary form. In a different 2009 interview, Wyatt laid out the band’s approach:

“I don’t think we have any interest at all in being pop stars or anything like that. In fact, that’s kind of our worst fear. We just want to keep this about the image of the Jackalope, which I think is sufficiently Dadaist. We want people to get into that image; it’s more about, “Go have a crazy adventure,” rather than have it be about our personalities. Because it really isn’t. It’s an experiment, and it’s an adventure. And it’s not much about anything else. I think it’s always a mistake when you start connecting a band to a personality. You begin to limit what you’re able to do.

We’re living in an age where you can find out just about anything about anybody. But I think that’s another big huge reason for the Jackalope, too. It symbolises that this time that we’re in is so privacy depleted that it’s better to lose yourself, your identity, in some kind of nonsensical entity.”

Their mystery-bound, experimental music was the focus, drawing on the Dadaism movement to shape a thought-provoking concoction of ridicule and nonsense as a tonic to cultural conformity. Showing an impressive degree of foresight for where the industry was heading, Miike Snow could be seen as the ultimate anti-popstar band from a trio of musicians who had climbed to the top of that mountain and weren’t satisfied with what they found at its peak, or how it is that they got there. 

And that brings us back to their debut, and track 7: ‘A Horse Is Not A Home’. It delves into the liminal, transitory, in-between spaces that are dotted across our lives; it brings this dissatisfaction with ‘success’ out into the open. “Oh god, I think I’m dying / And our drinks were just poured” are the first lyrics we hear in the track, a snapshot of a life drowning in the vices of drinks, drugs and sex. Wyatt speaks of a “yellow horse” waiting outside, drawing a parallel from the taxi ranks of today to past ages of horse-drawn travel, before singing the chorus as follows:

With a hole in the heart I was forced to ride in morning traffic

With a golden hand by your fortress side but without magic

Somebody, somebody, somebody tell me it won’t be long

‘Cause a horse is not a home

Pleads of “tell me it won’t be long” reflect our society’s impatience as well as its fatalism, in a hurry to get from A to B and in a hurry for it all to be over. The second line’s ode to the mythical King Midas evokes opulence and tragedy, whilst the “morning traffic” could represent an indignant return from a one night stand. On a surface level, the whole track could just be seen as a manifestation of anger at sluggish, slow-moving car journeys, but by considering the song in its strange totality we find a narrator adrift and dreaming, struggling to find their place in a fast-moving world. A horse is not a home; whilst in constant movement true belonging will never be found.

Surveying a fickle music industry, Miike Snow’s answer was therefore to forge their own space, creating a home for three industry-seasoned musicians to create strange, leftfield art under the protective shroud of the Jackalope. Mystery, anonymity and centring music over personality forged the bizarre excesses that make Miike Snow so great, and so different. The betrayal I felt upon learning of their industry status reflects the success of the Jackalopists’ “cubist pop” project, creating something that feels genuinely novel and distinct from the incessant churn of the mainstream.

In the years since their debut, stellar follow up albums in Happy To You (2012) and iii (2016) have continued the trio’s “crazy adventure”, delivering more left-field bangers like ‘Paddling Out’ and the platinum-selling ‘Genghis Khan’. Their 2024 single ‘I Was A Sailor’ has been their solitary release since then, during which time they’ve sporadically hit the festival circuit, most recently performing at Coachella last year. Whilst the band members have explored other projects — from Karlsson co-founding the critically-acclaimed electronic act Galantis to the three albums Winnberg has released with his band Amason, and Wyatt’s prolific songwriting and production work (who else can boast songwriting credits on Rosalía’s LUX and the Barbie soundtrack?) — Miike Snow fans have been eagerly awaiting updates on any new music from the Jackalope trio. The stores of mystery spent across their first three albums have been regenerating, and recent hints on their Instagram point to a fourth LP on the way.

In these trying times, Miike Snow’s experimental art may prove more potent than ever. Creeping authoritarianism, social media’s dominance, and the rise of AI are all themes of the past decade that deserve the Jackalope treatment, and would fit perfectly into their dystopic, left-field sonic landscape. But with strangeness and subversion their currency, speculation may be a futile endeavour. After all, Miike Snow aren’t always what they seem. Only time will tell where the mystery leads this time.